Monday, August 8, 2016

I Enjoy High Art but Realism Swamps Me

Acadia rangers/volunteers do a wonderful job of using cairns on the bedrock at the top of mountains to mark trails, but in woods the blazing is haphazard and spotty. I don't know if the policy is to blaze as little as possible and trust the hiker to follow the obvious (which is not always obvious) path or whether there is not a volunteer organization (such as Potomac Appalachian Trail Club) that maintains the blazes. We've not got lost, though we've had to backtrack more than a couple of times. My only complaint. We'd thought of going inland to hike Maine, we've five days of hiking left, we haven't covered half of Acadia yet, I'm not spending hours in a car I could be hiking here. We've booked the house for next summer.

Yesterday was Sargent Mountain, Gilmore Peak, and Parkman Mountain, hardest, most beautiful, best hike yet. Today is more ambitious - Dorr and Cadillac Mountains, two ascents, two descents.

We stop after the last ascent of each hike so Earthgirl can paint (I read and write) for a couple of hours.

I'm told Hillarium asswipes are smearing Jill Stein as a Putin stooge. I'm told Hillarium asswipes are smearing Jill Stein as a anti-vaxxer kook. I have no idea what Jill Stein thinks or has said she stands for, but here's today's stupidass Star Trek allusion: (Worf voice) I know nothing about Gauron other than he's an outsider who has challenged the Council. But Duras? I know Duras.

Floyd tweeted out ▲ last night, the evening after I had posted Elkin's Dick Gibson's manic monologue on the, to steal from Floyd, living death of perpetual emergency. Elkin wrote Dick Gibson in 1971. I tweeted the link to me back to Floyd, hastening to say that while some of us are wired to dig the perpetual emergencies, there are more people percentage-wise now so wired for the reasons Floyd cites (24 hour news networks, internet, etc). So yes, I dared directly address a bleggaldigitaloverlord, and got the no acknowledgement/no response I deserve.

I am a quarter through Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. So far it's been a conventional novel on the horrors of slave life, but now that the two main characters have runaway from the plantation and actually gotten on an underground railroad - as in a train underground in Georgia in 1822 - it's getting good and weird.

Offer ends at midnight tonight! One of you has an Elkin on the way, if you want one email, comment, or DM/twoot me by tonight.

4 comments:

I feared that there would come a time during this incredibly stupid season when you forced me to violate my policy, and that time has come. I regret this.

It's no smear. At best, Jill Stein is pandering to anti-vaxxers. And she knows it--she made an effort to walk back her position and got busted at it. If that is true, it's completely unforgivable and absolutely disqualifies her from any leadership position in organized society. I understand that you don't give a shit about that, since you're fundamentally opposed to organized society in general, and that's your business and I've long since accepted it, kindly and lovingly, I hope. But no quarter for a fucking idiot of her magnitude. An idiot who is, I hear tell, an actual medical doctor. Fucking despicable.

At worst, she's an actual anti-vaxxer, and it looks to me like that's the case, because the language she uses in pandering to anti-vaxxers is exactly the language that anti-vaxxers use to claim they're not anti-vaxxers. EXACTLY that language. I know that you trust my qualifications to gauge that without reference to politics. And I credit that it's possible that she's pandering, which is not, as I noted, a save for her. Not even close.

She's a nutbar and has no business running for office, and if she's actually an anti-vaxxer instead of just another pandering shithead politician, she and any offspring for which she's responsible have no business being around other humans.

Write ME off with any nouns you choose, based simply on our differing assessments of the risks and stakes of this stupid season (or any such season). But it's no smear, and your supposition fails you in this case. Pretty badly, I am truly sorry to say.

And in case you're tempted to run that stupid fucking bass video, I know where you live, mofo. I'll kill a bunch of bass with my bare hands and dump them on your fucking stoop. Actually, never mind. That sounded like a threat to me, but after I typed it, I realized that to cat people and their beloveds, it's a promise of treasure.

I'll take your word for it on Stein and anti-vaxxing: this is how I figured to do my research on the subject: I know the issue is important to you and you're far more informed than most people on the subject.

I was hoping the Hillarium was *right* on that: it throws so much bullshit that accurate insightful and useful information that would be vital in forming an opinion about a candidate just sounds like so much Hillarium disinformation. I wish I had been clearer in the post that was part of my point in the first place. As I said, I don't know shit about Stein, but I do know how the Hillarium works.